Abstract
Multi-dimensional performance scorecards, despite their own individual limitations, can be helpful in countering the perverse incentives associated with simplistic performance measurement packages, such as relying solely on ambulance response times. Moreover, the potential to link different dimensions of performance to the perspectives of different stakeholders demonstrates at least a potential alternative to the top down, imposed nature of performance regimes based on instrumental rationality. Such circumstances increasingly apply to the English emergency ambulance services. Conceptual frameworks drawn from the management control literature have the potential to play a significant role in facilitating an inter-disciplinary approach to performance management. The use of the rationality clusters conceptualisation is held to be particularly helpful; as it suggests that, under certain circumstances, relational performance measurement systems would be more appropriate than transactional ones, as the ones used in the ambulance services